Hafsa Kanjwal's "Colonizing Kashmir"

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World.

Kanjwal applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Tourism and cinema served to territorialize India’s colonial occupation in both its secular modernizing and Hindu nationalist avatars and in some ways highlighted the co-constitutive relationship between the two. It also enabled an unquenchable desire of Indians toward Kashmir (and some Kashmiris) that would continue to undergird India’s strategic rule in Kashmir.

Page 99 of the book is at the beginning of the third chapter, “Producing and Promoting Paradise,” and both provides the argument for the chapter, and also situates how Kashmir historically came to be “special place” in precolonial and colonial texts. The chapter overall examines how tourism and Indian cinema consolidated the desire for Kashmir in the Indian colonial imagination and “reordered a religious, spatial, and gendered imaginary of Kashmir that was both linked to and in need of India. Kashmir was a place to be seen and experienced, and in turn, to claim.” An important overall argument of the book—that Hindu sacred geographies and histories were pivotal to “Nehruvian secularism” in India—is also mentioned on this page. In this way, the Page 99 Test works very well as readers would get a very good idea of some of the broader arguments of the book and the interventions it tries to make in South Asian historiography.

The book examines the different modalities of control that the Indian government and its client regimes used to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir. These policies were mostly directed at Kashmiris—but, in this case, they were also directed towards Indian citizens. On this page, readers will be introduced to how the governments prioritized an affective attachment to Kashmir through cinema and tourism, which then enabled the average Indian citizen to lay “claim” to Kashmir. The second half of the page then delves into how Mughal and British colonial accounts also used the idea of Kashmir as a “paradise” in order to consolidate their rule.

Visit Hafsa Kanjwal's website.

--Marshal Zeringue